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42 turns · 33 minIn 2019, a small group inside one of the biggest agencies in sports went looking for data on women. Women as fans. Women as athletes. Women as executives. What they found was almost nothing. One interim study from 2003, a handful of scattered papers, half the consumer economy essentially unmeasured. Since then, that group has published dozens of reports, a little think tank that now spans 30 professors, and by its own accounting, unlocked close to a billion dollars in investment in women's sports. Today's guest, Thera Lavelle, Managing Director of The Collective. Her path here was anything but linear. She majored in French and religion. She saved money, working days, and assistance to a life insurance underwriter and nights as a server at a steakhouse. Then she moved to France without a job and simply kept showing up at the ABC News Bureau until somebody handed her videotapes to log. That turned into five years at ABC, producing and booking for Good Morning America. Then Public Relations. Then L'Oreal, where a nostalgia play pairing a legacy men's fragrance with Dale Earnhardt Jr. put her on a path to running promotional marketing for Lancome. Fifteen years ago, she landed at the agency where she sits today. company she first met from the other side of the negotiating table. In this conversation, Dara gets into what the research actually says, why women athletes are twice as engaging as their male counterparts, what 15,000 respondents across 12 countries reveal about who's really buying the tickets, how AI is reshaping a business built on decades of proprietary data, and the one piece of feedback from a boss has changed how she valued her own ideas. I'm Bryce Clinton, and this is a ROAR podcast.
Welcome to the ROAR podcast. I'm your host, Caroline Valbarty, and with me today is Fayur Laviel, Managing Director of the Collective at the team, formerly known as Wasserman.
Welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure and an honor to be here. Thank you. Yeah.
So we saw each other in Chicago on the home court at the Obama Center for WNBA All-Star a couple of weeks ago. Usually we kick off episodes with telling us about your career and how you got to where we are, which we will get into. But I would love to hear a little bit about your thoughts from your experience at WNBA All-Star and any key takeaways or insights. You've been in the space for a long while now, and I would love to hear any of that.
I thought WNBA All-Star Weekend was remarkable in the sense that it really, Chicago as a city kind of showed up and showed out for it. I think the Sky put together that incredible event at the Obama Center, which was an all-day summit,
and then
additional events coming thereafter. which was unique and special and certainly right in line with what WNBA is about and its players. But I thought what was interesting this year was how that event, the All-Star event, has become really a central moment in time for all of women's sports. So it wasn't just about women's basketball. It was everybody that works in women's sports was there. All of the different leagues and teams and teams entities were just showing up, A, in support of each other, but
Episode notes
When Thayer Lavielle set out to build a research practice around women as fans, athletes, and executives, the problem wasn't interpreting the data. It was that the data didn't exist. She describes searching for insight on women as insurance buyers and turning up a single study from 2003. Six years after launching The Collective in the wake of the U.S. women's national team's World Cup win, that gap has been filled with dozens of proprietary reports, a think tank spanning thirty academic researchers, and — by the organization's own accounting — close to a billion dollars in unlocked investment in women's sport, a figure Thayer suspects is conservative.
In this conversation with host Caroline Valvardi, Thayer traces a career that ran through Paris, a New York newsroom, a French beauty conglomerate, and a NASCAR partnership before it ever touched sports strategy. She unpacks what a 15,000-respondent study across twelve countries revealed about the invisible logistical load women carry when booking live entertainment, why women athletes generate roughly twice the engagement of their male counterparts despite smaller followings, and how a decade of proprietary data is changing what AI can actually do for an agency. She also makes the case that the research itself is the flywheel: more data creates more conversation, more conversation attracts more capital, and more capital funds